In one country where such groups are active, Greece, the dust is still settling after Sunday’s elections, which saw a startling triumph for the Syriza party. It campaigned on a pledge to overturn the austerity programme imposed on Greece to try to reduce its massive sovereign debt.

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Volunteer care

Around 40 ad hoc clinics are now thought to exist throughout Greece, staffed by volunteer doctors, nurses, pharmacists and specialists, and funded by donations. Such clinics have almost certainly helped maintain the health of thousands of Greeks in a country where the unemployment rate is around 25 per cent.

But the clinics cannot provide more than basic healthcare, says Alex Kentikelenis of the University of Cambridge, who has visited some of them. “The volunteer clinics were created to cater to desperate health needs,” says Kentikelenis. “They’re all autonomous and rely on doctors and nurses volunteering their time, and people and pharmacies donating drugs, plus other things like diapers or milk.”

Kentikelenis says it’s difficult to quantify the clinics’ contribution, as data on their activities is almost non-existent. “Forty clinics may not be enough anyway, and they can only provide primary healthcare services. If something’s more serious, they probably have neither the staff nor the facilities to deal with it.”

Giving the poorest citizens access to healthcare doubtless played a part in Syriza’s election campaign, says Kentikelenis. On his visit to the clinics, he noted that many of the volunteers were left-wing, as is Syriza, although their primary motive was to help people rather than garner votes.

Next, Spain?

Could what’s happening in Greece prove a trailblazer for Spain, also encumbered by debt and an unpopular austerity programme? Here, too, there is an anti-austerity party, Podemos, hoping to do well in elections due by 20 December.

Although it has no citizen clinics as yet, people in Spain are increasingly reliant on help from charities. Deep cuts in health expenditure of 13.7 and 16.2 per cent respectively in 2012 and 2013 have seen pensioners, the unemployed, immigrants and others become dependent on organisations such as Medicos del Mundo and the Catholic charity, Caritas. In 2013, Caritas provided assistance to more than 2.5 million people, a 580 per cent increase from 2007.

In as yet unpublished work, Legido-Quigley cites a survey carried out last year in Madrid which found that 21 per cent of pensioners reported stopping at least one drug because they could no longer afford it. She says that at least 500,000 immigrants have been excluded from healthcare provision since 2012.

Against the backdrop of disillusionment with austerity and mainstream politicians, Legido-Quigley says that health inequalities will probably translate into support for Podemos, as will the success of Syriza in Greece.